


from porcelain to ivory to steel

by mspennydreadful



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 21:38:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20955311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mspennydreadful/pseuds/mspennydreadful
Summary: The little bird has flown her cage twice over, but she yet needs to become the She-Wolf they need her to be, red in tooth and claw, not just in the Tully-red hair.





	from porcelain to ivory to steel

The chill fades from the metal as she holds the inkwell over the flame carefully, warming the little bottle and its contents the way she'd seen her parents or Septa do hundreds of times. Inkwells were just one of the many everyday items designed with a stolid functionality in her homeland, and she'd been dazzled by the variations in the South. Staring into the flame overlong, she remembers the lion-shaped inkwell of red porcelain that Cersei had set before her once, demanding she write to her brother and her mother and beg fealty. Like much else in the Red Keep, especially around the Queen (perhaps _including_ the Queen) it had been a pretty thing unlike anything Sansa had known growing up, a southron fancy that would not survive even a summer snowfall. Lord Glover and some of the others see her as no better than that inkwell, she thinks, brittle and lovely and useless to the North. Maybe that had been true, once: when her head was full of dreams of a beautiful life in King's Landing, she had been every bit as much the Northern Fool as the men in her family who had bleed and died so very far away from Winterfell.

She'd been easily seduced by pretty things, once, from a golden prince with an ink-black heart to a glamorous city that had proven far colder than the snows of home. She'd clung to fancies for too long, desperate for life to become a song and not a dirge, and where had it gotten her? The ink is flowing again, ready to bleed her urgency onto the ivory-white parchment, but her sooty fingers are stiff with the cold as if forcing her to be deliberate about this. The battle will be met, steel and blood, and she must choose to let her people most likely die or to offer atonement to another man who'd cage and wed and bed her given the slightest chance. 

Now, here, she has a chance to be better, to be stronger, to reclaim her stolen homeland and wash away the horror of her dreams with the red blood of a dead husband - but only if she's clever and ruthless. The little bird has flown her cage twice over, but she yet needs to become the She-Wolf they need her to be, red in tooth and claw, not just in the Tully-red hair that she's learning to use, too. It's no small favour she asks, his men and his aid, and Petyr is a man who understands the cost of everything, but the value of nothing. He'd taught her to play it all out in her head, and she's done it every which way, and the only path forward brings him back into play.

Jon, she thinks, will learn to forgive her when they are be warm again in Winterfell, where the stones themselves breathe hotspring vapors within. If not, it won't matter for they'll be cold and dead in the snows before the next moon. Winter is coming, and with it, a time for the wolves.


End file.
